DJ Waldow wrote a post on explicit permission over on Mediapost. I think he hit on some interesting bits and wanted to comment on them. In order to comment on a Mediapost blog, you have to register. I’ve thought about it before, but every time I start the process I get to the page asking for detailed demographic information and decide no. This time, I was inspired enough by DJ to get to the...
A few months ago I got email from Staff of Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont, to an addresses scraped off one of my websites. At the bottom it says: You are receiving this email because you have ordered from us, or emailed us in the past. We take your privacy seriously,and promise never to give your personal information to any other company. Most people probably wouldn’t know that for the...
One of the discussions that surrounds email marketing is whether relevance trumps permission or permission trumps relevance. I believe this entire discussion is built on a false dichotomy. Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much...
Chad White wrote an article for MediaPost about best practices which parallels a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about how the email marketing industry treats best practices. After several conversations recently about “best practices,” I’m convinced that the term is now meaningless. It’s been bastardized in the same way that the definition of “spam” has...
I have been reading the complaints filed by Holomaxx and will have some analysis and information about them probably Monday or Tuesday next week. I’ve been keeping an eye on the press and something that Ken Magill said caught my eye. Specifically, HolomaXx alleges, its Microsoft complaint rates have been consistently at or below 0.5 percent and its Yahoo complaint rates have been at or...
Mickey talks about appending and why it’s not a good practice. There are a lot of companies out there who love using append strategies, and who find themselves changing email service providers three or four times a year — always hoping for “a bump in deliverability.” I don’t think that there is any accident to that correlation. They are doing something that results in enough complaints...
I have an adorable cat that I ‘taught’ that I would pet her if she tapped me on the arm or shoulder with her paw. It was cute for a while, but then she got more and more demanding. Eventually, she was clawing at my clothes and skin to get attention and petting. It’s gotten to the point where I have to put a stop to it. She’s just getting too destructive to me and my...
As an email policy wonk, I think a lot about how specific policy implementations can go wrong. Sure, every policy can go wrong, or not fit a common case. A lot of people only write polices that address common cases and don’t worry about the rarer cases. The problem is there are some rare cases that may cause significant harm and those cases should be addressed. Consumerist has a case up...
A week or so back I talked about clicktracking links, and how to put them together to avoid abuse and blocking issues. Since then I’ve come across another issue with click tracking links that’s not terribly obvious, and that you’re not that likely to come across, but if you do get hit by it could be very painful – phishing and malware filters in web browsers. First, some...
There are dozens of people and companies standing up and offering suggestions on best practices in email marketing. Unfortunately, many of those companies don’t actually practice what they preach in managing their own email accounts. I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a...
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